The Rise of the “Liberaltarian”
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gsb.stanford.edu
That is, of course, the model that Nordic social democracies have followed for many years now. Denmark is by many measures significantly more free-market than the US; note their absence of minimum wage, mostly privatised fire and ambulance services, enviable ranking on most indexes of economic freedom (eg, https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking?version=638), and so forth, and so on.
Letting the markets be relatively free to generate money, capturing it via efficient flat taxes (first and foremost, a consumption tax), and using it to fund an effective social safety net targeted at the poor is not a unique idea, it's what some parts of Northern Europe has been doing for the past 40 years.
Maybe they meant "unique in the US political debate".
I’ve heard many US Libertarians say that they want the US Fire services completely privatized. We would stop paying taxes for this services and instead private services would spring up that we could chose to pay monthly for. The competition would drive down prices as there would be a free market of many such providers.
This is not what Denmark is doing. Denmark has traditional fire departments paid by the government. It’s almost entirely a single company and that company is almost entirely owned by a non-profit organization.
I don't think this would work very well, because I do want my neighbors to pay for fire-fighting services in case their house is set on fire. Moreover, to a proportionally lesser extent, I want their neighbors to pay for the same thing, and so on. There are a whole lot of cross-externalities that can't be dealt with easily via private contracting, so we need the government to step in and provide a sensible "default" that's not simply "no one gets any fire-fighting protection unless they pay for a private service".
In order to remedy this, the insurance companies formed a collective fire department that we all pay for via a fire service levy that is part of our house insurance.
Where? Is this the majority normal situation globally?
I think that putting it like this is a bit misleading. So, in about two thirds of Danish municipalities fire fighting as well as rescue services are outsourced to a private company which is commissioned by the municipal governments. But that is certainly not the classical state-run structure that I suppose most people would be thinking of when they read "traditional fire departments".
(Yes, this is arguably traditional in Denmark by now, but I think it is actually more of an exception in the bigger picture of traditional fire fighting.)
Where I come from, for example, professional fire fighting services actually are honest-to-god state-run entities. Our overall fire-fighting structures are actually extremely good value for the money. But this really is only possible because a significant part of the actual work is done by voluntary fire fighters, as we have managed to preserve that part of our culture, so far at least. And that is really traditional fire fighting (even in Denmark, if you disregard the last 100 years or so).
Which is why Denmark is also much less free market than the US. Businesses operate under strong social constraints, and power structures aren't one-sidedly pro-business/pro-corporate.
Why is this not free market? Employees are part of the market as well. At some point you may argue that the unions form a cartel maybe. But that is another sign of a free (from state) market
The Nordic countries aren't "free market" by any American definition of the term. They're corporatist/tripartite economies. This has just become a fashionable talking point among the mentioned 'liberaltarians', like the Niskanen Center, who invented the term to my knowledge.
I think it's mostly a PR campaign because if you frame social democracy as being free-market it just sounds nicer to the center of the American political spectrum.
A lot of of labour protection that you don't find in the US nonetheless exists, like 1 year+ of paid maternity leave, usually at least 5 weeks of paid vacation per year, ~35-40 hour work weeks and so on. When people talk about free market aspects they usually mention school vouchers and such and selectively pick a few things where the government is more hands off.
As the article mentions Uber/ridesharing as a yardstick, take note that Uber withdrew from the Danish market in 2017 after facing regulation, in Norway only Uber Lux is still active after facing fines, and the same happened in Finland. In Sweden Uber still operates in three cities but all drivers require taxi licenses.
To me, this sound like a guarantee of greater worker freedom than anything else. Somehow economic “freedom” in the US seems to equate to corporate structures where CEOs and other managers have immense power over the lives of hundreds or thousands of workers (including their ability to get healthcare), with almost no counterbalancing force.
Implementing this kind of rule seems a pretty sane check on that level of authoritarianism, no? Beyond a certain level, the workers actually have to be given a say themselves?
Who cares if it's free market or not? A strong union presence is significantly more effective than a minimum wage. One amounts to a voice and the other amounts to table scraps. We typically associate unions as anti-free market, because the Right is pro free market and anti union, and the Left is pro regulation and pro union. I'm not talking Republicans and Democrats but Right and Left, to be clear.
I have some hope that people are tired of boxing themselves in, that they're realizing we need real solutions to real problems. It doesn't help when we gotcha each other with different political ideologies when they step outside of their boxes. If someone on the Right wants to argue that unions are Free Market, and that makes it palatable to them, high fives all around.
Part of the intent behind an employment contract is that the employee will mostly not have to bear risk in the business itself, or in market conditions. That's a legitimate demand, but it does imply that you'll be paid quite a bit less for your effort than if you really were bearing that risk of having your earnings fall due to no fault of your own - let alone being outright sacked because someone else has volunteered to do the same job for cheaper.
I think leaving these broad social insurance considerations to wholly private contracting between employees and businesses is a very bad deal for workers, and also explains why e.g. the least pleasant jobs can pay so little. A UBI-like arrangement would allow us to get a lot closer to the "truly" free market in labor you posit here.
It would be a market where if you were unemployed,
but qualified, you could approach a company and
offer to do a job a bit cheaper than an existing
employee, and expect that the employer would sack
that employee and take you on instead.
Depending on the job, there will be potentially-large costs with swapping out employees like you say.
- Even if 100% qualified for the position in general, the new hire is likely to be lacking in knowledge specific to that company/role. It will take them a while to learn how things work at that particular company. On something like a large software codebase, it might be quite a few months before their productivity matches that of the engineer they replaced.
- There is a "morale cost" there. When companies visibly treat their employees in this way (like instantly replaceable cogs) surely it has a negative effect on effort and loyalty among the remaining employees, who have been indirectly told that they are instantly replaceable cogs as well. There are any number of hidden costs here: reduced effort/productivity, the cost of replacing them if they leave due to reduced loyalty, etc. I don't have figures to back this up, but I think the burden of proof would fall upon anybody claiming otherwise...
Further, why do the most unpleasant, and not necessarily easy, jobs
often pay the worst wages?
In general though, it's a function of how many people can do the job. Working retail is NOT easy, and is soul-crushing, but probably 98% of the workforce is capable of doing it, and the cost of replacing employees is small, so there's unfortunately little incentive to treat or pay those workers well.
You also neglect that it generally takes about a year to get adjusted to a new business before you can do much more than follow process that someone gives you (you just don't understand the system level implications yet). If you want employees who can drive innovation and process improvement, they have to have some longevity with the company. You do see many companies moving towards what you suggest where they have core technical teams of employees who oversee/work alongside contractors who do the grunt work.
In other words, until and unless we provide everyone with a basic income sufficient to support a modest living.
As it stands, and as you observed, pay for work is based primarily on some very old-fashioned notions of the value of the people who do the work—which is to say, anyone doing menial jobs is obviously a lesser being than those who tell them what to do. Then anyone telling them what to do is a better human being than their subordinates, and so on, until we reach the logical conclusion that CEOs are like unto gods (or at least kings), and must be treated as such.
This is not an indefinitely sustainable model, particularly in the face of increasing automation and increasing income/wealth inequality.
A basic income would result in people only doing the terrible jobs when there's actually sufficient incentive for them to do them, since they're no longer driven by desperation. Thus, assuming other external pressures haven't come into play, the wages for such jobs would rise until they actually compensated for the extra (sometimes literal) crap people have to deal with to do them.
The traditional answer to unfair power structures is revolution and replacement of the power structures by something else. However, revolutionaries always seem to end up building similar power structures in one form or another. The abuses of Marxism against the general population were obvious, although it can be claimed that the Marxists did little more than establish a form of state capitalism, with a single "company" running a country (and preferably the world). Only the anarchist tradition is in favour of abandoning power structures completely, using direct democracy in each community to make decisions. Each person is supposed to have equal power but be subservient to the community (although anarchists vary in the details).
Basic income, like social democracy, is basically a way to alleviate some of the worst aspects of capitalism (for the poor) so that the system can continue with less chance of revolution. Social democracy lost influence as the Soviet threat diminished, so that capitalists felt less threatened by revolution and were able to impose a harsher form of capitalism. Capitalism has had the advantage that basically everybody with a decent income ends up supporting this idea of personal wealth and lower taxes. However, the harsher (purer) forms of capitalism are more likely to concentrate wealth (power) in the hands of a few over time, bringing back to the threat of revolution.
I think the extent to which I believe "capitalism" is a viable system for the long run depends on just how you define "capitalism," since I've seen several different definitions that describe rather widely varying levels of inherent inequality and oppression. At the very basic level of "creating some form of market in which currency can be exchanged for goods and services", I believe it is absolutely a valuable part of any healthy socioeconomic system (and, indeed, a fairly natural and inevitable emergent behaviour).
I think that to a significant extent, the introduction of basic income could be accurately described as a revolution, even though it would (hopefully) not be one in the more literal, bloody, sense. Personally, I care deeply about the value of human life, so I believe that if there is a way to achieve whatever utopian ends we seek without having to resort to violent conflict, they should at least be explored thoroughly. I believe that, given time and protected from reactionaries and from serious corruption, a basic income would lead to radical changes in our society that benefit the many and reduce the ability of the few to control or otherwise oppress them.
As far as "Marxism" goes, while I admit that I haven't done any in-depth research on the topic myself, my understanding is that the countries that have declared themselves Communist and attempted to follow through, to whatever extent, on his manifesto, have never gone all the way through the process, and have by and large not been at all the type of economy he described as being viable candidates for a shift to Communism (largely agrarian economies, where Marx described primarily industrial ones). I don't know if Marxism can work at scale (though I have my doubts, related to my first point in this post), but I firmly believe that it has never been tried with any meaningful degree of faithfulness to his methods. In short, I think one should treat any self-proclaimed "Communist" country with at least the same degree of skepticism that one applies to self-applied system names such as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and actually analyze the practices there to determine their form of government and economy.
Citation, please? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm begging you, with tears in my eyes, for a citation.
Denmark, where fast-food workers make something like $20 per hour, doesn't have a minimum wage (as other posters have noted). I'll see if I can circle back to this later, but I'd guess that countries with strong union presences have higher rates of people who make more than whatever the minimum wage is for that country. Rather than a race to the bottom, and a constant need to redefine the bottom as it gets too low, you (collectively) have a seat at the table, where you can voice your wants, demands, and concerns.
Setting a minimum wage, especially in a country as large and diverse as the United States, is a pretty convoluted process. I know HN has some pretty large threads discussing the $15 min wage proposal from a few years back. A living wage is different in Seattle than it is in Boise, etc., etc..
It's convoluted, and it relies on legislation. A union says, "We're not doing shit unless we get X, Y, and Z." People hoping for a minimum wage increase beg people to consider the poor. So, setting aside the fact that one is arguing for middle-class (or upper-class) accommodations while the other is arguing for lower-class accommodations, one is arguing from a position of power while the other is asking for pity. One is saying, Your operation will grind to a halt if the compensation isn't adequate, and the other is saying, Please do the right thing, and give me enough money to live.
https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/97/2/495/502559...
Look up the Davis-Bacon wages. These essentially act as union bargaining for non-skilled trades (as well as skilled trades). The evidence would be the rates for general labor are much higher than minimum wage. These same workers often get minimum wage in jobs that do not adhere to this.
Why? To me it seems that governments have far stronger means to enforce a minimum wage than unions have.
The other thing I forgot to mention in my previous post - minimum wage doesn't address benefits and working conditions; though, it could affect those things if high enough (if the wages are high enough everywhere, the other things would have greater impact on where people choose to work). But, unions get to specially argue for things like breaks and better/safer equipment. Certain standards cross industries, and it makes sense to legislate those, but it makes sense for workers within their respective industries to have the ability to ask for accommodations specific to the industry/its conditions.
If I were the one paying the workers, I'd rather address their specific wants and concerns than I would the wants and needs of the working population. Of course, they (in general) would rather address neither, and it's easier for them to defeat legislation than collective bargaining.
1) It's very hard to set it at a correct level. Too low and it does nothing; too high and it causes rampant unemployment. Set it at the right level and you can get some real benefits, but good luck figuring it out, considering that the right level changes from year to year, city to city, and industry to industry.
2) No matter how well you set it, it only impacts the bottom of the labour market.
A health labour market (including Northern European style unions) can help set wages intelligently, flexibly, and across all levels of the economy. The fact that unions (unlike the government) cannot just pick a number out of the air and enforce it by fiat is a key element of what makes it work.
I’ve seen effects of both good and bad unions, but struggle to define clear distinctions other than one appears much more corrupt
Not really. We still believe in market regulation like any sane approach to market does. Well functioning markets are made, they don't just emerge if you remove regulation (except when conditions are just right by accident). Liberaltarian approach is ideological approach to markets that ignores all research into markets.
Example: there were no laws preventing diluting stock during a hostile takeover until after Vanderbilt tried buying out the Erie Railroad and diluting stock was a way to swindle him [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_War#Watered-down_stocks
They react to different types things. Both types are important, which is why we need markets as well as some amount of regulation.
Stuff like truly extensive regulation or outright central planning is nowadays relegated to narrow settings where market entry is considered infeasible and a "natural monopoly" cannot be avoided, so there is a real need to "carve out" the portions where competition is not feasible and apply strict regulations to those. That mostly applies to public utilities and a few large businesses like airlines, etc. Internet-provided social platforms may be in the same boat.
It actually sounds like there is something you want to say about human capital diversity. Why not say it?
After we entered the EU that Roma population mostly emigrated to wealthier countries out West, including Denmark, which wealthier countries were as bad as us at integrating them (including the beloved Denmark or Norway).
All this to say that seeing many Americans in here daydreaming about life in countries like Denmark or Sweden is very ubermensch-y. Yes, when you have a small, privileged and mostly white population things are easy, only when it gets mixed up things start becoming complicated.
The Danish West India Company? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_West_India_Company
==Yes, when you have a small, privileged and mostly white population things are easy, only when it gets mixed up things start becoming complicated.==
Not sure where you are going, but you seem to equate “culture” to “laws”. People aren’t pining for the culture of Norway and Denmark, they want the economic policies and Norway and Denmark. We could pass distributionary legislation regardless of how many “white” people we have. It sounds like a cop-out.
Also note that the Helsinki metro model is very similar to that in Vienna, so not a distinctly Nordic high-trust thing.
Gates focr people to pay, but they slow the whole system down and you want your transportation system to feel as good as or better than driving.
Danish income tax is certainly progressive rather than flat [1]. That's important for keeping inequality low, which again promotes social mobility and trust--crucial for an efficient free market.
Country | Labor union density
Sweden | 66.1%
Norway | 52.5%
Denmark | 67.2%
Finland | 66.4%
Iceland | 90.4%
U.S.A. | 10.3%
I know a real case of horse meat sold as beef in UK and they have lots of regulations (including the EU on top of local). You can put all the rules and laws in the book, but don't just relax and hope all will be obeyed. As some SCOTUS decision stated a while ago, some laws and regulations are made so dense and confusing it is almost impossible to comply to the letter - they were talking about something as simple as driving a car on a public road.
It has many advantages compared to a system where the government to literally pre-define every single thing in the economy and create specific regulation and test procedures for it, even if in most cases these things are not needed.
Acting like the world of judicial regulation (which takes years and lots of money to see through) was somehow better seems like rose-colored glasses. Whether the FDA’s scope should be adjusted is a different discussion.
Food quality was improving before FDA was established and continued rising after as well. Most quality improvement is driven by consumer demand that was the case before and after FDA.
Your mention of “quality improvement” is another slight of hand as that’s not really the FDA’s purpose nor do you support it with sources. Show some data for food (and drug) safety preceding and following the FDA and we can discuss.
In any case there are other areas of regulation, such as environmental protection. What will happen when those are relaxed?
I think everyone belives this.
The challenge has always been finding the most useful laws, as well as preventing special interests and rent seeking.
The devil is always in the details. Every regulation is different.
If you look at British Common Law many of these problems have legal precedents that would be evolved based on real world cases.
This is what economist like Armen Alchian, James M. Buchanan, F.A. Hayek and many others have been arguing and researching for decades.
There are of course criticism to that approach, but to just dismiss it as if it didn't exist is not fair.
Go look at how complex topics were handled in common law, often with very good understanding and solutions.
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-10...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_...
[4] https://www.insidesources.com/joe-bidens-record-on-privacy-m...
The author of this book is a white lady who uses the book as a marketing tool to sell her diversity training and consulting services to corporations. I'm not making a value judgement on that, but I think it's important information to have. There's a reason why big companies across the country latched onto that particular book, it was tailor made for them.
Broockman: I’m sure that at least some of their political views have to do with self-interest.
I'm pro-Left everything, except when it effects my huge revenue stream.
Go figure.
I am both left and right, depending what issue we are talking about. And sometime I am center as well. Yet when it’s time to vote... I have exactly 2 real choices.
https://austingwalters.com/on-committing-suicide/
I think in part that’s why we have polarization. We have two extremes pulling each party apart, social media (as this article suggests) is pushing the left. The right is largely getting disenfranchised so they are getting more fanatical.
It’s a recipe for an eventual civil war or at the very least the road to dictatorship. To be honest, both sides are leaning towards some sort of fascism. I explain in my post above, I don’t see a way out of it unless some republicans and democrats decide to team up and get this country back together.
There are, or until recently were, plenty of moderate and right-wing people on social media, but the companies have so many ways of tilting the scale in favor of their preferred political views, they've intentionally created echo chambers where only far-left political opinions are acceptable.
And that leaves people feeling disenfranchised because a few companies now own the means of communication, and there are no good alternatives for people who are silenced by these companies.
Things like that aren't being driven by grassroots activism. These are decisions made by billionaires.
That may have been incidental. It makes financial sense to market to those whom you expect to be most inclined to employ your services. In this case those who feel that they cannot freely express themselves on the competing products. That group is necessarily centered on those who's honest expressions receive the most attention from deplatforming activists.
So naturally this made people angry. People don't want to compromise with a party that gained power through not compromising because moving closer to the center means they just move further right.
The disenfranchisement of the 'right' comes from people associating racists and bigots with the right. A commentator further downstream equates Gab being banned as an example of 'conservatives being banned' which is a perfect example. Because Gab as a site is full of disgusting remarks, racism, threats and bigotry which people on the right seem to believe is a core tenant of conservatism nowadays.
Given that the current administration is conservative and has been active in attempting to take away my rights and the rights of my friends, I'm more concerned about that than some people on Twitter yelling about things. That's why I find the comparisons incredibly disingenuous.
It's like mixing vinegar and baking soda.
The voting system encourages extremist candidates, and the social media platforms engage the least nuanced voters to primary (something that they never did before).
The main stream media follows ratings and legitimizes these extremist views.
The ultimate outcome is a political discourse that is gradually promoting zero-tolerance, zero-discourse, and a slow march to the normalization of political violence.
I'm not sure people recognize the danger escalating polarization is causing. The mere mention of it as a systemic issue is usually met with a "both sides" dismissal, which is very discouraging.
We need to reformat social media and/or change the voting system, or there will be violence. The purpose of democracy is to obviate political violence by forcing different views to the table to discuss and compromise. Social media is silences those who even suggest that path - making violence inevitable.
Compromise has become the eighth deadly sin.
Which is in fact the most likely outcome.
"Liberaltarians" as described in this article split the economic axis further, since they're anti-regulation (generally considered economically right) and pro-redistribution (generally considered economically left).
They all hate the way it’s done now, and favor other arrangements like a negative income tax or UBI (as a substitute for government-run services).
I haven’t seen all the questionnaire, but the questions shown in the article could be read both ways.
Libertarian base idea is freedom, as much as possible; redistribution is the opposite of freedom because you work, earn money and someone comes and takes it from you. Makes sense?
I suppose "all that much" is the key term. Is European style redistribution (aka a nice flat, utilities, TV and smartphone, clothing, health insurance, food and cash money to spend on whatever you please) not all that much?
It's not like we're wasting 90% of taxes on administrative overhead, so I'm not sure what could be improved there, without adding more "undue and costly burden" on those who work, unless you're suggesting taxing e.g. capital gains rather than income.
They really haven't. Classical liberalism, while perhaps more popular than in the U.S., is still a niche political stance in Europe. The 1980s saw a wave in liberalization and deregulation, and that's when stuff like NIT or UBI reached its peak in popularity.
Look at how hard it was for German to reform its social system in 90/00s for example. And German was one of the countries that actually achieved significant reforms while many others didn't.
To your point on wasting tax money, have you seen the defense budget lately? Can fix those two issues and them some with some moderate cuts. Capital gains taxed the same as earned income would help too, but won't make enough to solve the big issues.
For sure. I didn't understand the comment I replied to to mean those who work though. That (including healthcare) is what you have in Europe if you don't work at all.
I wasn't saying that tax money is wasted, quite the opposite, I was saying that most of the money is not in overhead, that is, it's reaching its intended recipients. As for cutting the defense budget in the US, I'm torn. On the one hand: easy savings. On the other hand: a lot of the US' economic position in the world depends on being a/the super power. I don't know how much and how large the military edge has to be, so it may be possible to cut the spending by half and not lose a lot in economic advantages, but it may also be much closer coupled.
I assume that this refers to unemployment insurance, which is often provided for a limited time, and/or requires you to be actively looking for work. One of the issues with the European model of social insurance is precisely that those who are working at the low-end of the labor market are not included in this kind of redistribution. Enforced unionization and strict labor regulations are then used to make up for this, but that means losing flexibility precisely where it's most needed. You can witness the outcome in places like France, where the poorest and most vulnerable are locked out of the labor market altogether leading to huge society-wide issues.
> As for cutting the defense budget in the US, I'm torn.
You could cut a lot of the defense budget in the US if the US's allies started paying their fair share. Of course, paying for US allies' defense comes with foreign policy advantages for the US so perhaps this arrangement is also "fair" in a way.
I'm in Germany, unemployment insurance has a time limit, and does require you to look for work, but the benefits are based on your previous salaries, what I was referring to is general welfare. It does have a provision that requires you to look for work as well, but it's rather theoretical, and unless you're basically taking a dump on their desk and tell them to go shove it, you're not going to have your benefits cut. The largest constraint is that you need permission to go extended holidays.
I'm not suggesting it's a great long-term idea to incentivize not contributing to society, or that it's not costly for those paying for the party, I was originally just pointing out that we do a lot to redistribute "the fruits of labor", and that it does reach the intended recipients, as I wasn't sure how to understand your statement.
Yeah. Either that, or you could maybe, like, not have an empire and cut back on the military adventurism? But I see that may be a hard sell in a society in which all the mainstream media just frickin LOVE war. Really, there's nothing just like a nice little war! Or at least bombing a few poor people now and then. It just makes for the best reporting. Also, the military-industrial complex needs to feed. And they seem to be quite cozy with the media-industrial complex. So it's a win-win scenario really. Except for the poor people of course, both at home and abroad.
No, if you don't work you don't have healthcare, only emergency care that I think it's similar to the one in US. Also the quality and availability of healthcare in Europe is degrading fast, mostly because there is no free lunch and it is impossible to cover unlimited medical care for everyone, it would cost more than the entire GBP of each country.
No, really, you do. I'm speaking for Germany here, if you're unemployed and on long term welfare, the state pays for your health insurance (and it's at a subsidized rate), you have the exact same health insurance as any normal employee that is using the public health insurance (which is the super majority, only a few industries, the self-employed and high-salary employees can opt for private insurance instead).
As an European, I have to ask what exactly does this refer to?
I think it's arguments like these (going back to conflict with socialists over such definitions) which lead to libertarians claiming they do not base their philosophy on "freedom" but rather "liberty". Which they more narrowly define as something like the freedom specifically from external force. Not the freedom to do whatever the hell you want no matter who it hurts etc.
But I'm sure you know better what they believe.
Well that's where you went wrong already. Surely most libertarians respect these guys, but that's about as far as you can take it. Some do love them, I suppose. To others they're thoroughly misguided in some of their conclusions, which are seen as much to statist-socialist in nature. See e.g. [1] for a libertarian critique of Hayek.
I'm not claiming that all of Hoppe's positions are typical for, or representative of all libertarianism. I just used him as a handy example that the assertion that "libertarians love F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman" is not a given, which is exactly the topic of the lecture I referred to.
As an aside, I'm sure the guys at the Mises Institute will be ecstatic to hear that you think their media presence is the best, even though all that sweet Koch money is going to Cato. I think I kind of agree. :)
Uh, no. The Friedman/Cato Institute folks are/were definitely libertarian and part of the right, and Murray Rothbard has a terrible reputation among them, as someone who was extremely ideological and had very little appreciation for sensible policy or even for good intellectual argument. I'm actually not too familiar with HH Hoppe, but it looks like he too has pretty fringe views. The LvMI does plenty of good work, especially in raising awareness and popularizing economic thinking broadly-construed, but Misesian libertarianism is fringe.
Why do I seem to keep getting objections to the simple statement that not all libertarians "love Hayek and Friedman"? I mean, really, it's not that great of a claim.
And lastly, call Rothbardianism fringe, but it's surely still libertarianism, right? Rothbard's been hugely influential on modern right-libertarianism as a whole, so why the insistence of erasing him from the picture?
Alternatively, one can see it as a way to distribute power to independent power structures (government, society, markets, ...) to prevent one structure dominating others. Each such structure is a threat to personal freedom, but with different manifestations and effects. And it is more manageable to have more smaller threats than less bigger ones.
"What we owe to others" is not settled by the question of freedom, and therefore it is perfectly logically consistent to be a libertarian proponent of redistribution.
Why is one "entitlement" and not the other?
In either case, there is no logical fallacy present. And the question is independent to the question of freedom which is secondary to the question of moral constraint.
Ie., establishing what is moral in our interactions with others (murder, theft, etc.) is prior to the question of freedom -- freedom is whatever remains to be maximised when moral constraints are in place.
The cause of "freedom" is therefore often rather a meaningless one. Everyone is pro-freedom except the "freedom to do what is immoral". And so the question is only ever really, "what is moral?"
Ie., what we owe to others, and what they owe us supersedes any particular political programme.
>> M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity."
I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first half." And, in fact, it is quite impossible for me to separate the word "fraternity" from the word "voluntary." It is quite impossible for me to conceive of fraternity as legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice being legally trampled underfoot. <<
Does "negative freedom" include "freedom from reprisals for murder" ?
Ie., in a society which maximises "negative freedom", is there no system of redress for murder?
I do not think a libertarian believe so. Rather they have a prior morality in which certain actions "deserve" a redress -- ie., you are owed punishment, or you owe a victim (of, say, theft) what you have stolen from them.
So everyone in this conversation both wishes to maximise negative and positive freedom. The only variable is the moral constraints we place on that maximum.
In the case of leftwing thought, one benefits from society in a way which creates obligations that are not fully "internalized" in market transactions. The positive externality of society is not accounted for: you owe something by being in society which, unpaid, would be theft.
Also, they are doing property damage to the victim's body. (Yes, I'm being a bit whimsical here, but this would technically be a valid charge in this case, as far as I can tell.)
From that point on out they are guilty of a crime for which they may be tried and punished. I don't see where the problem is, frankly.
So moral principles are prior to a discussion of freedom. The meaning of "negative freedom" isn't freedom as such. As in everyone can do anything (the Hobbesian state of nature).
Rather it is freedom after a choice of certain moral principles. The comment i'm responding to thinks that there's a logical contradiction between "freedom" and "redistribution" but there is none, because "freedom" has very little content.
It is always "freedom" after morality. And the diagreement therefore lies in "what we owe to each other", eg., here, you assert the non-aggression principle.
In a system of negative freedom contracts entail a duty to honor them, ie., are the source of obligations to others.
So a system of negative freedom is really just one where only you can obligate your future self to be duty bound to do something for someone else.
The libertarian still regards this as a duty, so it is a seemingly arbitrary one and contrary to "freedom as such".
The question "who decides what my duties are?" isnt even, in libertariaism, "only you". Because the duty to honor a contract is prior, ie., you are bound to it.
So the libertarian arbitrarily ringfenses a small number of principles to be prior to the question of freedom: NAP, contracts, etc.
The redistributionist can likewise ringfense some principles and claim to maximise freedom and hence to "morally superior outcomes".
As to the point of obligating your future self to honour any contract that you have agreed to, the point is that you yourself chose to enter said contract voluntarily. The strength of the whole philosophy is that it seeks to deal with potential sources of conflict by presenting a minimal set of clear-cut rules and leave the rest up to the participants. As you cannot choose to be a participant, because the mere fact of your existence forces you to be one, it simultaneously tries to maximise your freedom of choice from there on out.
Many words have been spilled about the "social contract" as legitimisation for the state. Yet how convincing do they really sound in the face of Spooner's pithy rejoinder that "I didn't sign any contract, so I'm not bound by your laws and regulations."?
BTW, I don't think you will have an easy time to argue that any other set of a priory rules does a better job of maximising freedom. The toughest critique of libertarianism that I know of rather seeks to dispense of a priory morality altogether in favour of a consequentialist point of view. Scott Alexander Potter has done so in his anti-libertarian FAQ, just in case you haven't already read it (not saying you didn't, just mentioning it).
My point here is just the contingency of the starting point: many do not regard "their word" as obligating. It's a rather magical sort of perspective: that "an oath", "binds", etc.
The reason we find promises of this kind even intuitively plausible is social: we immediately intuite that there is reputational damage associated with breaking a vow.
Libertarianism thus trades on social instincts in its set up, strangely prioritising just a few of them (aggression, vows, etc.).
This is disguised by a language of "freedom and reason", but really it's just a very old-fashioned communtarianism -- that as with most -- works in a near pre-social small-tribe environment, but fails to generalize.
When you cannot track people's reputation because you live in a civilization of millions/billions, "contracts" alone aren't a plausible to conduct business.
The "social contract" is not something "to be signed", but a recognition of the folly of "signing" (oath giving) in a society where no one hears your oaths.
To the people who keep calling for a stronger state to protect them from the evils of capitalism I say: You are being duped! Your chosen path to salvation is in truth the instrument by which you are enslaved!
I am much more optimistic that practical solutions may be found to deal with the problems of non-statist societal solutions than with any statist ones.
I'm convinced that as long as we have not achieved a state of post-scarcity - which may be never - any attempt to abolish property rights is doomed to bloody failure.
Lastly, any societal order that demands even the slightest obligation of active cooperation from any individual - be it at the behest of another individual, an oligarchy, or even a majority - must in time devolve into tyranny.
The only path to a solution that I can currently see would have to work along Georgist lines. When money can be raised from common inalienable property, that would enable redistribution without theft. The capitalist tragedy of negative externalities could be solved with a scheme of compensation for damages to a common property. (&c.p.p.) Such a kind of setup might be able to avoid all of the worst pitfalls, I believe.
How is it a contradiction?
According to libertarians government as it’s currently practiced steals (takes by force) the fruits of individual’s labor called taxation, along with compelling the use of property through force, called regulation. The argument is more complicated than this but that’s the essence. So “left libertarians” supporting taxation for the purposes of welfare programs contradicts the ethical foundation of libertarianism.
It’s a contradiction to advocate for the lack of government regulation on the basis of violating libertarian ethics while simultaneously advocating for welfare programs which violate that same ethic.
I "stay in the center of the circle" as Tao Te Ching advises, but I also cannot deny the superiority of the Free Market. (Not to be confused with whatever the United States does for healthcare).
We have countless examples of competitive markets performing best, and a handful of government controlled markets that are horrible (healthcare, education, real estate, banking)
Some people call this inevitable in capitalism, that government will be used to create inequality. But at least this is not intended, whereas other economic policies make this a feature.
Anyway, can't vote for Republicans, they like big government which seems like an obvious bad idea.